The Australian Government's intervention in the Northern Territory is sickening, rotten and worrying, says one of the most powerful Aboriginal leaders in the territory.
At the Garma Festival in Arnhem Land, former Northern Land Council president, Galarrwuy Yunupingu, called on people to fight the Howard Government's takeover ofNorthern Territory Aboriginal communities.
"I have got a political agenda to run," he said. "This is a worrying Government, not worried about us but worried about himself [Prime Minister John Howard], and worried about his few rich people and business people that support the coalition that puts them back into government to run amok in the nation."
Aboriginal leaders, politicians, academics, judges and artists have gathered at Gulkula, a dry community close to the mining town of Nhulunbuy, for the four-day indigenous festival. But Canberra's unprecedented emergency intervention to combat child sexual abuse after a report from the NT government took centre stage on the first day of the event.
"We in the Northern Territory are about to be dispossessed of everything, everything that we've got left from the original dispossession of our land and lives," Yunupingu said.
"That I should go and change my lifestyle and become a white man is worrying, worrying and sickening."
Yunupingu called the federal government move "the lowest of anybody's form of policy".
"I am just reminding people that this is a struggle. I appeal to you to stand beside us to fight the rottenness that is... the sickness of this Government setting out to take away what's rightfully ours."
Yunupingu has met more than 30 indigenous leaders, drafting a letter setting out opposition to the decision to seize control of more than 70 communities.
